In his latest book, bestselling author Mike Dooley builds on the principles from Infinite Possibilities and Manifesting Change to offer a step-by-step strategy for leveraging the Universe in the course of self-fulfillment and success. In just a seven steps, Dooley teaches you how to channel the Universe's incredible energy to achieve your greatest dreams. Filled with practical strategies and simple exercises that anyone can do, Leveraging the Universe lays out the path to engaging the magic that is available to everyone. Dooley weaves his inspiring personal history throughout the book to demonstrate firsthand how properly applying the Universe's power has brought success and fulfillment to his own life.

EXCERPT

What Do I Want?

Many people wondering where they want to go with their life approach me with questions that sound a lot like this: “How do I find that special niche that only I can fill?” “How do I discover my purpose?” “How can I know what I should be doing with my life?” Yikes! Can you see how from the get-go the original question of “What do I want?” has very subtly turned into questions preloaded with assumptions—assumptions that render them unanswerable, assumptions that have nothing to do with what you really want?

In the first chapter, we talked about the nature of our reality and saw that you are a creator. You’re now careening through eternity, rediscovering yourself, your playfulness, and your incredible, almost unbelievable powers. You’re not here to save anybody! You’re not here to fill some kind of career niche! You’re not here to find out what the right job is for you!

You’re here simply because you, a fragment of God, wanted to be here.

You chose to be here to see what might happen, based on the choices you’d make once you arrived. You’re here for the adventure of it. You’re here to let your desires take you wherever they may.

You are here to be you!

You are precious and extraordinarily unique. Your existence as you were, are, and will become is a vital part of the whole. Your insights are irreplaceable; you see with your eyes a view of the world that has never been seen before. You hear with your ears what has never been heard before. You feel with your heart what has never been felt before. And with this gift of existence, all you have to do is simply be yourself.

Life—the whole thing—is a discovery process, an adventure process, a fun-and-games process. There are no preconditions. There are no prerequisites. You can have whatever you want. That means there are no shoulds! Should simply limits and obligations. Or they imply that you’re concerned about what other people think, fitting into some kind of mold, making enough money, or the like. There’s nothing helpful or empowering about shoulds.

But notice what happens when we go back to the guiding, and long since forgotten, question that actually sparked the confusion most people are tangled with: “What do I want?” Returning to this, to your primal, divine desire, while pitching the shoulds, will completely reorient you as it recasts how you see the world around you and puts you in a clearer place for charting your course. In many instances, it will also bring you back into the present, rather than have you living in the future, since the question is primarily concerned with what you want now.

This step of asking what you want and getting to the root of things doesn’t just apply to life-changing career choices; it applies to everything—even the simplest things. Too often we fall into the “should trap” because our society is of the notion that if we don’t figure out the shoulds and hows ahead of time, we’re being recklessly irresponsible. After all, no one is going to figure it out for us! Yet such thinking completely neglects the spiritual side of life, our divine heritage, and the magic we’ve always been free to tap into.

When the weekend comes, for instance, I often think to myself, “What should I do this weekend?” Or when it comes to writing a new book or another Note from the Universe, I’ll think, “Hmm, what should I write?” It’s another offshoot of the spiritually primitive times we live in that we often just think in terms of shoulds. And to compound the issue, not only do most people think that creating change in their lives must begin with physical effort, calculated entirely based on the world (the illusion) around them, but then we’re labeled selfish if we’re led by what we want instead of what is good for others, further causing us to think in terms of shoulds!

If I ask myself instead, “Do I want to work on a new book?” suddenly it’s easy to answer. Or for the weekend, if I ask, “Do I want to go here or there?” Then that’s easy too. “Who do I want to spend time with?” “What do I want to give priority to in my life?” These all become easy questions to answer.

Clarity is magnified when you change the word should to want, and this substitution becomes easier to allow yourself to do when you understand that whatever payoff the should would have theoretically provided—like comfort, safety, or even abundance— is dependent more upon the Universe and life’s magic (once leveraged and engaged) than your choosing the right should. The Universe and life’s magic are best engaged when you’re happy, doing what you want.